Setting Overview
The Wildspace Campaign Setting is a very loose re-imagining of the Spelljammer and Planescape settings from 2nd Edition AD&D. With regards to tone and feel, the setting draws most heavily from Planescape, with a focus on characters as small fish in a cosmic pond, surviving in a world of dying gods, reality-warping phenomena and conflicts that last for millennia. Factions and organisations generally follow philosophical and religious themes, built by folk trying to forge some sort of coherent reality out of the weirdness that occurs when interplanar travel is commonplace. The Prime Material “Real life”, or the physical world in which things get done. With a few exceptions, your characters will be natives to the material plane - the “real world”. Over time, the line between the Prime Material and other planes has blurred, allowing outsiders to seep through the cracks. Most interplanar movement is one way, however. Denizens of the outer planes find it far easier to survive in the material than Primes do in the strangeness beyond it. History The Fall of the Illithid Now fading into distant memory, there was a time when the Illithid Empire reigned over Wildspace. The Illithid were the first to discover the secrets of traversing wildspace, allowing them to move from one world to the next at a time when all other folk were still bound to the worlds they were born on. The Illithid carved great magical tunnels through reality itself, using Elves, with their natural magical potency, as labourers. When the Gith arrived, they sparked a revolution that saw the Illithid overthrown and their empire shattered. With the Illithid Empire destroyed, these tunnels collapsed, trapping many elves within the mind-horror of the Illithid imagination. The Fall Wars Following the decline of the Illithid Empire, the Elves and newly emergent Drakons allied together and began to establish themselves as the new authority in Wildspace. The Orcs and Dwarves, who had formed a strong bond as resistance fighters against the Illithid, opposed this, sparking the Second Fall War. A band of Orcs and Dwarves, in an act of desperation, gave Spelljamming technology to the Humans of Terra in return for their allegiance. However, the Elves and Drakons eventually won the conflict and signed the Drakonin Concordat, establishing the Imperium that still reigns today. Spelljamming The fall of the Illithid was heralded by the arrival of the Gith, who had been slaves of the Illithid in another time and place. The Gith had their own way to traverse great distances, through the use of vessels known as Spelljammers. Spelljammers work by “ripping” in and out of material space through the plane of Limbo, where time and distance flows far more erratically. Spelljamming requires the navigational assistance of beings from the outer planes. Gith ships work by using rituals to strike pacts with elementals and other spirits to temporarily aid them. Dwarven ship draw on the mighty power of Dwarven collective effort - they require large crews working together performing actions in unison to draw on dwarves past, present and future. Drakon ships work by binding elementals and aberrations into mighty cores - this is often a beholder or an aboleth or something like that. Order and Chaos The Order/Chaos axis has a more concrete meaning in this setting. The weakening of the boundaries between the planes brought on by the fall of the Illithid has meant that reality itself is coming undone. Chaotic energies manipulate and bend the fabric of existence to some end, contributing to this decay and collapse. This includes all forms of arcane magic. The forces of Order instead hold the universe together as it is. Gods represent archetypal ideas that have coalesced over time into divine beings, and thus uphold the basic laws and structure of what some call “spacetime”. Faith, oaths and laws strengthen these gods and therefore help undo the tearing of the worlds into chaos. Gods and Magic The scars left by the illithid Veins caused great rifts to appear in space, growing ever larger and consuming more of reality. Magic was once ubiquitous, but the denizens of wildspace came to learn that they were tearing apart the very fabric of reality. Channeling arcane energy is now somewhat taboo - not outright banned, but seen as reckless and foolhardy. People turned to faith to fulfil the place of magic, channeling great beings, oaths or concepts woven into the fabric of spacetime. Clerics - once dismissed as remnants of an ancient past - have taken on a new role as safeguards of future existence, binding fleeting thoughts and passions into stable deities.